Modern Library Top 100 Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century (41)

To call a book the greatest memoir of WWI, seems to me to be a matter
of damning with faint praise. I don't doubt that this is the best
of the lot, but its weaknesses are those of the war it recalls. First
of all, one of the central myths of the war is that a reluctant but decent
generation of European youth was destroyed by the war, indeed Europe was
destroyed by the war. Graves spends the early portion of the book
lusting after a boarding school catamite. This homosexuality, or
at least a sadomasochistic homoeroticism, is a consistent feature of the
educational system of England's elites at the time and amply demonstrates
that rot had already beset British society. Then he heads off to
the war, despite his personal opposition to it, indicative of the
fact that these were not young men who were dragooned into the Service,
by and large they were enthusiastic about the War.

The middle section of the book is taken up with the senselessness of
the war itself and of life in the trenches. But there is something
intrinsically tedious to reading about tedium. And the attempt to
indict the stupidity of the officers who were running the war falls flat
in light of John Keegan's superb explication of their actions in his recent
book The First World War (see
review).

The final section of the book deals with his marriage to a socialist,
feminist, nutcase and his halting attempts to complete a degree and get
started in business. Finally, with all of these burdens piling up,
he shucks it and heads off to Egypt and then Majorca, wishing "Good-bye
to all that".

I like Robert Graves' historical fiction very much, but I did not like
this book. I should note that this is a rewritten version of the book.
Graves apparently took most of the edge off of the original when he rewrote
it extensively in 1957. It is possible that the original warrants
this Top 100 ranking. The extant version does not.